The Adjustment League

by Mike Barnes

  The table peaceful, spacious, with the departure of my woman-hating wanker. Bobbing beneath the colours and the roar. And relief to know his wicked shit will be long if not eternal. Otherwise I’d have to edit the next, the shortest-softest-strangest of my phases. And prepared texts don’t take to editing, they buck and buckle at it.

  I prefer telling it to the oil atop the rocking tea. Taking all the time I need.

  The Island. A place of magic and stability, as all islands first appear. Looming from choppy seas. Settling some. Age? Finding—and keeping—a shipper-receiver job at an art store. Lois the weekend framer, a painter finishing OCAD. Twelve years younger. Her family old money—old and new. And smart. Smart enough not to kick at the connection, figuring it would run its course. A nice enough guy, rough edges but treats her well I guess—still, I mean… Give her time… A solid plan. But then Megan came along. Unplanned, unprevented. Lois weathering the blunt force advisories at family dinners, chin set. And then the turnaround: deposit on the apartment. A year later, Megan almost walking, the down payment on the house. Smart again, midnight discussions: we’re not going to lose our only child and grandchild. All sealed with a kind of party trick. Jordan bringing out his old LSAT prep books after a dinner—a running joke, a ghost plan, that one day Lois would pack up the easel and join him in the firm. Megan gurgling, Lois tending to her, while I—subbing in, a good sport—run through the sections without a miss. Pop-eyed stares from Jordan, Melanie. The schooled with no conception of what omnivorous constant reading—in freight elevators stopped between floors, in coffee shops, in cells—can accomplish. Cut to first semester at U of T’s Bridging Program. Everything holding steady on the Island. Bringing home the A+s with only a modicum of effort. Rather relishing my status as a find, a project, Jordan’s outright merriment, like the guy who pried up an old floorboard out of boredom and found the jewels. Infectious, the delight. Like a speed habit gaining. By October, less prep and less sleep necessary for the same results. Amazement all around. By November, almost no sleep and definitely no prep or attendance needed—all energy redirected to much more pressing private research in the stacks. Independent initiatives. Which both subsume and trivialize the mandated syllabus. Don’t worry, be happy! Bridge? I’ll show you a bridge. And poor Lois with not much better luck with the parents—too ensconced in the fantasy train to feel the bump to another track.

  And out, into the chill and burger fug, before he can return.

  §

  Back at the ranch.

  Fuddling around the living room. On the couch, off. Reading. Checking out the window, Eglinton still there. Stretches on the floor—keep the joints usable, maybe tire out the body. One of those nights. Sleep not coming soon if at all.

  That is not what killed my mother. Not who. What. Talking about a suspicious death in the usual sense, the police sense? Judy gone everyday-procedural?

  No, it won’t be that simple.

  So you hope and pray.

  In Big Empty, I arrange the artifacts from Maude’s room along the front wall, propping them at intervals against the baseboard below the window. Photos—fall walk, family dinner. Bobby pins, clippers. “Christmas Music” on the USB. The box itself.

  You should have brought the balled-up nylon. Not part of the picture.

  Wrong. How can you know until you see it?

  Max’s card. Also, the box-framed single monarch wing. Fished out of a carton just before Strongbacks started loading. An unconventional memento. And the first of Judy’s talismans. A single wing. Half a migration? Half a metamorphosis?

  I sit cross-legged in the middle of the room. Not a posture I can maintain long. Back, knees. Letting the objects fill the space and say what they have to say.

  Which is nothing yet. They don’t have anything to say. Or voice to say it with.

  I lie down on my back and try it that way. Eyes closed.

  Same result. Nothing yet.

  Your mission, Mr. Phelps, should you decide to accept it—

  My teammates: a brainsick girl and her dead mother. You’ve had worse.

  As usual, this tape will self-destruct in five seconds…

  §

  Joy the enemy. Joy the culprit.

  It happened in a moment of wild dancing. A burst of savage euphoria that just had to share itself.

  And did.

  By next afternoon the apartment half cleaned out, their presences amputated cleanly, the stump disinfected with a note. I don’t blame you, but what you are is too dangerous to be close to. I wish you well. Please don’t try to contact us.

  I have to run very fast to stay ahead of it. Slowing or stopping, softness of any kind, brings it a step nearer. Images start to crowd me, splicings of memory and nightmare. Things that must have happened, could never have happened.

  Shrivelled screaming instants.

  §

  The views. From the balcony, the good brick wall and dark flashing of the Latimer. The blinking, giant’s playnib beside the lake, flicking neon at the clouds. From the window, fire station 135, the bus shelter, EMS. Lights on, doors closed. Good, but not the best. Best is knowing beyond doubt that people are on the job. That they’ve got your back, even without knowing who you are, and stand ready to make adjustments. And, flipside, the worst: the comatose Sunday mornings, Christmas, Easter, and all Civic Holidays—all those artificial lulls when the city lies on the couch like someone pretending to sleep while keeping one eye open. That’s when green tea longs for its departed betters of tequila shots and acid tabs and I stare until my eyes ache at the red doors of the fire station, praying for them to fly open, men in helmets scrambling, praying for the deliverance of a siren and the grill of the big truck in motion.

  The discipline. To work in six-to-eight-week windows of gathering rage and speed, followed by a wordless crash. To know the personnel and the conditions of the job site.

  Stone: Learn your windows.

  Mixed states my specialty. Acute, jittery alertness combined with steadily darkening mood. Turbid, seething energies: a rage recipe. A car chase on black ice, which ends, as it must, in a crash.

  In the aftermath of hyper-black, standard protocol mandates a return to base. That is when I’m most in need of a prolonged debriefing with Stone. And get one, always. The man reliably strange, strangely reliable.

  Ah, Stone. Healer, taskmaster, known enemy, surprising friend. His place of work a confessional crossed with a torture chamber. Hospice fronting a leper colony. I dread my unavoidable visits to him as a man with twisted limbs dreads his visit to the surgeon who must break each bone in order to reset it.

  And if the assignment arrives five weeks into the window? Maybe six. Inconvenient—very. A timing problem. Maybe serious.

  But a problem. Not a dilemma.

  You’re on the adjustment.

  §

  On the couch under a blanket. Close my eyes, then open them and watch the gleams from headlights and streetlights flutter up by the glass. The bed a mockery once insomnia sets in to stay. Better odds at surprising sleep out here.

  Grind-thoughts of a girl. How old now? With a half-melted face, standing at the edge of a classroom or recess yard—no, age her dammit—seminar room, employee lounge. Or girl—woman!—with a graft-smoothed face, talking and laughing in a group, knowing that underneath the work of a dozen surgeries she is still half-melted, will always be half-melted.

  And Lois. Really, forgiveness in her heart? Is there? Could there be?

  Stirred in with thoughts of the city.

  Something wrong, the streets unnaturally still.

  Can’t sleep.

  And then, the first light spooling into dark, I hear the sirens and I can.

  5

  “What kind of funds are we talking about?”

  “Nine hundred dollars will do it, I think.”

  A tiny pau
se. “Same as last time, then,” Ken says. Less gets by him than he pretends. Anything over a thousand, make me itemize it. What I insisted on at the start.

  “Different situation. But yes, about the same costs.”

  “And you feel yourself to be of sound mind?” Ken getting it out quickly, not comfortable even after all these years with asking such a thing, though the question is my own and I wouldn’t give him my business unless he agreed to it.

  “I do.”

  “And it’s something you’ve considered carefully. Reviewed over a period of time.”

  A short time. “I have.”

  “All right, then.”

  I now pronounce you manic and funds.

  The money will be in my bank tomorrow, Wednesday morning at the latest. Same account my regular remit goes into—$800, two days before the end of each month. Half for rent, the Owner’s top-up, and half for food, gas and other sundries. A maintenance dose. Money methadone, to keep the cells this side of screaming. And coverable, on average, from a conservative investment portfolio, not touching the principal. Leaving aside a little extra for the unforeseen. Ken double-checking on his calculator that first meeting, but doing most of it in his head.

  “Keep well,” he says before hanging up.

  “Sorry, that suite’s taken. Hanging in might still be available.”

  No dry chuckle this time. “Stay safe, my friend.”

  Stay safe, my friend. Making another coffee in the French press snagged at Goodwill, I consider it. Banker’s bonhomie in another mouth, but not in Ken’s I don’t think. Not just that. Though we meet barely once a year, neither of us could forget our first encounter. Lifting the lid on my life to let him peep at the roiling. I needed to scare him to gain his full attention. Let him know exactly what he was dealing with. His eyes widened, the MBA part of his soul wanted to run. But the concern he added, then and now, seemed his own. Seems genuine.

  Two months after discharge, still lying about the half-empty apartment. Mind blank as sand, hours passing without event, as I moved from chair to bed to chair again. Spring happening unnoticed beyond the windows. Bringing myself slowly off the haze of ward drugs, halving the dosages, quartering them a few days later. Jordan’s cheque still uncashed. Anxious messages from him, mutterings of “expiry dates,” the danger of funds “in limbo.” Even an icy reminder from Lois, Jordan looming inaudibly behind her. But I needed to know. Or needed to be sure of what I already knew. I wouldn’t work again. The hodgepodge of half-jobs and charity placements that had sustained me for two decades was done. At a stroke on a December evening, real winter had begun, and I was no longer work material. That was beyond question. The only question was how to live the time that remained on Jordan’s payout.

  Stretching a sum that was huge if life was a day, a week, a month. Modest if it was years. But if the life dragged on for decades—as even impossible lives were known to do? Live on two hundred grand a year—hey! Live off it forty years—oh oh. The only alternative would be declaring—or trying unsuccessfully to hide—my atrocity windfall, Social Services suspending my disability pension (with clawbacks for the assets hidden), then burning through the whole amount, leaving me, one fine day, a broke mental patient in his mid- to late-forties. No job, no income, no hope—a perfect zero.

  Psychosis doesn’t come with a pension plan. And death’s the only mandatory retirement.

  “You need to know everything to be of use to me. I’m a pretty strange case,” I said, that first day in Ken’s office.

  “Every person’s situation is unique,” he replied. I let that go. Ken was better than that. He’d better be. What I’d told him so far simply wasn’t dire enough. An edited version that would sober him without frightening him off. An ex paid by wealthy in-laws to vanish couldn’t shock a banker. Megan might, but she would never come into it.

  “I’m severely ill, Ken. I’ve worked in the past, but I’m unemployable now. That door’s closed.”

  “You seem pretty lucid to me.” Straightening his tie, then bringing his eyes back up to mine. A suspicion that I might be able to trust him after all beginning to germinate. I could feel its tendrils, thin as hairs, somewhere under my breastbone.

  “Seeming lucid is what I do. And can almost always do. It’s how I get by.”

  “Surely there must be some treatments… I’ve known people who… … depression makes a poor advisor…” I let him go on murmuring these bromides, which in ninety of a hundred cases might be true or partly true, because I knew he needed to get them out of his system.

  “Ken, I wouldn’t be sitting here if I hadn’t tried everything. Riding a broken merry-go-round and dreaming of the high plains isn’t hopeful, it’s dumb. Especially if the plastic ponies are booby-trapped.” Just confusing him now. No metaphor. “Now, I need you to tell me what, on average, you can make two hundred thousand dollars bring in a month.”

  “I can do that. But I’ll tell you before I do, it won’t be enough to live on. Not even close. Especially not in Toronto.”

  “I’ll make it be enough.” Arrangements. And hitting me, belatedly, like cold rain after clouds, the surprise that I wanted to make it last. Wanted to live. Just what I’d denied, time after toneless time, to the heads without faces, smooth ovals, on the ward.

  “And the principal stays put for a rainy day? For an eventual retirement?”

  Stays put for a tsunami. But don’t hit Ken with your world all at once. He’s done well. Better than well.

  “For retirement. You got it.”

  §

  Just after 8:00. Ken starts early. So do I. Up at 6:00, after a few hours on the couch that are less like sleep than like mildly sedated wrestling. Eyes open, closed, open—there’s not much difference, the same coiled thrashing. So tired, so fucking bloody tired, so so… and yet. Tired’s only what you’re supposed to be, all you’re supposed to be. Only part of what you are. What’s this now? Like a three-hundred-pound doorman heaving a whiny drunk, energy bounces the drain. Force that surges from within, blooms bursting from your chest and limbs like the Hulk exploding the natural boundaries of Bruce Banner. You’re here.

  Not calm and rested, heavy-feeling. You’ve had the occasional solid shut-eye, eight hours of nourishing oblivion, and there’s no mistaking the difference. This is adrenaline laid over exhaustion. A snort of meth or coke jacking a steady drop.

  Tingling with energy you know should not be there, but still it feels so good, better and better with each second, depletion a cranky neighbour whose moans grow steadily fainter.

  With just that nagging sense of guilt, shitbird cawing erratically from your shoulder—warning that the surge is wrong, to be other than flat-out wrecked is wrong, a violation against input-output regs reliable as gravity.

  Which the first sip of coffee shoots you past, far out into there and neutron star doing. Fatigue and hesitation falling out of view, lifeless planetoids not worth recalling.

  No lobby glass today. This morning’s harvest is tipped recycle bins. Blue maws spilling cans, bottles, newspapers, pizza boxes, takeout cartons, and untied bags of trash passersby chuck in rather than wait till the next city bin. Tenants do, too, some of them. Flip it where it doesn’t belong on their way out, save the ten steps down the hall to the garbage room.

  The other nightwork’s a huge black tag sprayed onto the concrete beside the garage door. A huge square, maybe eight by eight feet, it makes the perfect canvas. Primed by Owner-ordered attempts with wire brush and soapy water to remove previous tags—arm-wasting hours that smoothed the bumpy surface and sealed it with an all-over mottled gray.

  This tag interesting. Black bulbous curves, surging and overlapping. Some dipping down, an overall rising. Too insistent to be called loops. Power coils thrusting against a pressure trying to contain them. A local breakthrough on Eglinton Avenue, kraken to the Owner’s gray goo.

  Upstairs, the ph
one machine tells me two fish have wandered into last night’s net. Blinks of phosphorescent green as they dart inside the electronic mesh. The Owner won’t be one of them. He sulks at every rental, glaring at the gouge he missed. Yes and thanks Sanskrit to him.

  Nicole, Vivera’s Move-In Coordinator, will be pleased to give me a tour any time before noon. And luckily, as it happens, Dr. Wyvern can fit me in at 3:15. The same middle-aged female voice as on the answering machine. But cheerful now, not droning. Needing to welcome, not dissuade.

  Day is forming. Horse and wooden cart and hunched-over driver have taken shape out of thin air and are moving, clip clop, down a fogbound street. Hop on the back and see what comes out of the mist.

  Feeding time. You’ve let the stomach grumble long enough. Top it up and tell it you’ll be back in ten hours, outside. It’s less likely to pound on the door if it knows the stint ahead.

  Two slices of toast with peanut butter. A banana. Glass of soy milk. A complete protein, a vegan in a line smiled approvingly. And the bigger miracle that you don’t get tired of it, day after day. Still a tasty blend, three hundred and sixty-five mornings a year.

  Chew it slowly by the window. Small sips. Make it last.

  …luckily… as it happens… can fit. The art of medical reception to always let the patient know his less-than-urgent complaint is being shoehorned into the healer’s crammed queue, a crumb of attention strictly on compassionate grounds. Starts you off craven-grateful, a workable footing.

  But we know better, don’t we? A broken tooth, a loose one… faltering, out-of-it-sounding voice. What’re we looking at here? A crown, a likely extraction, at a minimum. Three grand to start, with every likelihood of more from the crumbling, middle-aged mouth. Compared with a good oral soldier, wanting a check-up and cleaning, what dentist could resist?